Pocket Empires House Rule

Pocket Empires p.47 Planetary Development Costs

PE p.47 under the heading 'Planetary Development Costs' it states that it is not necessary to divide total RU cost by the number of years involved and pay that amount each year, that a minimum payment of 1 RU per year is permitted. This would appear to allow 1 RU to be paid for say 9 years and 91 RU paid in the final year. Also it would allow a player to only pay 1 RU in the year he starts a task thus saving himself the remaining cost if his meta task roll fails, as opposed to paying say one year's worth of RU divided by years. It would mean that anyone paying the full RU cost of a task up front would be foolish. We found this unrealistic.

In the Theta Borealis game we interpret this as meaning that payments must be made in an unbroken consecutive sequence of years, and that the maximum amount that can be paid in any one year is the total RU cost divided by the total number of years (minimum 1 RU per year).

Thus it follows that a 10 year task costing 3 RU would be fully paid up in 3 years at minimum rate of 1 RU per year, but in accordance with p.47 the task would not be complete until the stared time has elapsed (so 7 more years to go).

A 10 year task costing 30 RU would be delayed if the player chose to only pay 1 RU for the first five years, as he would only be able to make payments of 3 RU per year for the last five years, for a total of 20 RU. He would still have 10 RU to pay before the task is complete, which would be a minimum of 4 more years (3 at RU per year and the final year at 1 RU), and a maximum of 10 more years (paying the minimum of 1RU per year).

A 10 year task costing 30 RU, if paid for at the minimum rate of 1 RU per year, would take 30 years to complete, and so would be 20 years overdue.

In this way, a player starting a task can limit his initial payment to 1 RU before rolling for task success, but if the total RU cost is greater than the number of years, he is delaying his task's completion by at least one year by doing so.

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